Manga, Anime, and Miyazaki--page 2

Now when did "cartoons" or pictorial representations of stories start? Truth is we’ve been doing that as long as we have records. The earliest cave paintings from 20,000 years ago were probably done to tell the story of the hunts or the myths of the people who did them. Certainly Egyptian hieroglyphics would count since the earliest form of them were simply illustrated scenes from stories or histories. In Europe probably the best known early "cartoon" is the Bayueax Tapestries. It’s a long tapestry done to tell the story of the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066. It reads from right to left and is a series of individual scenes or panels which tell the story in a chronological order. So it’s hopeless to try and find who or which culture did the first cartoon, we’ve all been doing it. The best we can do is find early examples through out the world and show how they lead to what we call, in the 20th century, cartoons or comics.

The best introductions to manga for a western English-speaking reader are the two books on the subject by Frederik Schodt: Manga Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1986) and Dreamland Japan (1997). In these books he points out the history of manga, showing how the idea of picture stories has its origins in Japanese art going back centuries at least to medieval times. Here is a more recent example of a Japanese woodcut of "comic book art" illustrating the story of a cat and mouse from 17th century. But the modern form of manga in Japan got a significant boost from just a single person, a medical doctor turned comics artist in post-WWII Japan: Osamu TEZUKA. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that he single-handedly created the modern manga industry. It might not be far wrong to say that the real reason that manga caught on in Japan and comic books did not here was because they had Tezuka and we did not.

Tezuka was born in 1927 and had started in medical school at the end of the war. He had intended to continue with his medical career, but his heart wasn’t in medicine and he had begun drawing comics on the side. Because of postwar economic depression in Japan, there was a rise in the number of inexpensive magazines that were printed on very cheap recycled paper. In 1947 he started a magazine of his comic Shintakarajima ("New Treasure Island") that sold in his native city of Osaka. He was soon approached by several large publishing houses from Tokyo (then as now the center of the Japanese publishing industry) and was hired to create comics for the boys’ magazines. By the middle 1950s he was writing several different manga serials and was so popular that essentially every other manga artist in every other Japanese magazine was copying his style. By the end of the 1950s manga comprised more than 50% of the Japanese magazine industry. Just to give you an idea of the popularity, Shonen Jump here printsabout 4 million copies a week, roughly the same number of copies of Time magazine prints weekly in the US, but this is for a country half our population.

Tezuka is considered "the god of manga" in Japan, and after his death in 1989 a museum was built in the city of Takarazuka (near Osaka) to display his works. You can view the exhibits and his artwork by going on a virtual tour of the museum at their website www.tezuka.co.jp Of course all the text on the website is in Japanese, but you can easily follow the links to look at the galleries showing photos from his life and examples from all of his major works. The Japanese post office honored him after his death with these two stamps. The one on the right shows a self caricature of Tezuka and the one on the left shows him with his most famous creations: Tetsuwan Atom (Astroboy), Ribon ni Kishi (Princess Knight), Blackjack the doctor, and Jungle Emperor Leo (Kimba the White Lion). Each of these started out as a manga series and ultimately he helped transferred them into animated series on television. Because of this Tezuka is also considered one of the pioneers of the Japanese animation industry.

Some of his animated work made it over to the US. Jungle EmperorLeo was redubbed in English and shown for several years in the late 60s and early 70s in the US on NBC and later in syndication under the name Kimba the White Lion. And it was this work by Tezuka that the Disney animators later "borrowed from" when they created The Lion King, and then caused a stink in the animation community (both professionals and fans) by refusing to admit this fact. The irony of this is that Tezuka himself was a huge Disney fan and his own style is based onthe 1930s animated shorts by Disney and Max Fleischer (the animator who did Betty Boop). Tezuka idolized Disney and even got to meet him once by accident at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. He ran up to Disney and gushed just like any other Disney fan, and then was greatly moved to find out that Disney knew who he was. Disney said he was impressed with Tezuka’s animated series Astroboy (which had just started showing on US television) and hoped someday to dosomething like that.

(For more information about the Tezuka/Lion King story, check out Fredrrik Schodt's essay aboutthe controversy and check out Tomoyuki TANAKA'swebsite which includes several quicktime clips and still images from Jungle Emperor Leo.)

I mentioned that Tezuka based his style on the cartoons of Disney and Max Fleischer from the 1930s. This is where the style of having large eyes in manga and anime comes from. The 1930s cartoons used big eyes because it was easier to express feelings and emotions with large eyes. Tezuka copied that style and it appealed to the Japanese love of things that are kawaii (cute), so all the manga artists who came after him also used large eyes until it became a standard part of the manga/anime styling. Ironically over the years the eyes of Disney’s animated characters grew smaller (relative to the 1930s stylings) until the 1989 film The Little Mermaid. Ariel had larger eyes than any Disney character in years, and her character design was done by Glen Keane, one of the top Disney animators who was a big Miyazaki fan. Since The Little Mermaid, the Disney style has definitely swung back to the "large eyes" style. So you see how the "large eyes"style has come full circle, from Disney to Japan and then through anime, back to Disney again.

While he played a significant role in animation, it was still manga where he had the greatest influence. Not only did he create the modern manga industry, but entire genres of manga were created by him. Princess Knight for example started the genre of shojo manga, particularly the tradition of a girl’s comic where the heroine takes on the male role of a knight or swordsman and goes forth to have adventures (as we’ll see more about this in a bit). To give you a complete overview of how much work Tezuka did in his lifetime, here are his stats (from Fred Schodt’s book):

In Japan he is best remembered for his comic and adventure stories, But Tezuka’s other contribution was to create the idea that serious drama and adult themes could be told in manga form. He did a serious series of stories exploring Buddhist religious themes called The Phoenix, he did a fairly adult retelling of the Thousand and One Nights stories in manga form, and here we have the first volume ofhis epic The Three Adolphs. While the style looks like a cartoony version of the 1930s, the story is deathly serious as it following the intertwined lives of two young friends living in preWWII Japan, one a Jewish boy named Adolph and the other a half German, half Japanese boy also named Adolph, and how their world changes when the third Adolph (Hitler) plunges the world into madness. And this raising the bar of manga to include serious adult works and themes is what ultimately allowed manga like Nausicaa to exist.

As I mentioned, popular manga are the ones which are turned into animated series and movies in Japan. Roughly 90% of all Japanese animations started out life as a manga (such as say, Sailor Moon). Now while most people in the US know nothing about manga, most people do have some knowledge of Japanese animation, or anime asit is called. But what little they do know is Astro Boy,Speed Racer, and all those highly gory, ultraviolent porn cartoons onvideo. Anime has gotten a bad rap here in the US because of this, to the point that some video stores slap the "18 and over" label on any Japanese animated video, even if it’s something innocuous like Miyazaki’s children’s film My Neighbor Totoro. But you can’t paint all anime as violent and pornographic any more than you can label all movies from Hollywood as violent and pornographic. There’s a lot more out there in anime. Here’s a list my friends and I came up with where we listed some of the major genres within anime along with examples of series in that genre (most of the ones listed here are available commercially in the US)

The problem is that when western companies started importing anime for the US video market in the late 80s, the easiest titles to sell (and translate) were the ultra-violent or the soft core porn titles. No one bothered with importing the teen soap operas. There wasn’t a market (yet) for those. That is changing now as the fan base of anime has expanded and more mainstream titles have entered the market. Most of them are still the shonen titles, but the US companies are now starting to bring over some of the shojo titles as well. Sailor Moon is an example of a shojo anime.

Remember I said Tezuka started the shojo manga genre with Princess Knight? Well, Princess Knight in the 50s and 60s ultimately led to one of the most popular manga/anime of all time in Japan in the 70s: The Rose of Versailles by Riyoko IKEDA. This told the story of Oscar Francois de Jarjayes, a young girl in prerevolutionary France who is raised by her father (a count) to be an expert sword fighter. She is so good that she is appointed as the head of the royal guard serving to protect Marie Antoinette at the court of Louis XIV. So you have a lot of gender bending here, a woman taking on the societal role of a man in the very ordered prerevolutionary French social order, going on to have great romantic (and ultimately tragic) adventures herself in the process. The Japanese couldn’t get enough of it. And further down the road is a direct descent of Rose of Versailles, one of the current mega-hits of the 90s in Japan: the TV show Revolutionary Girl Utena . The title character here is Utena Tenjou, a 14 year old junior high girl in a private boarding school in Japan. She is an orphan having lost her parents years before, butat the funeral a mysterious prince appeared to give her a rose signet ring and tell her to remain strong and he would someday return. Then he disappeared. [Long romantic sigh.] Doesn’t that just set your heart a-flutter? Sounds like a classic romance doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t. Instead of waiting for her prince to come as a traditional girl would, Utena decides to imitate him. She starts dressing as a boy, becomes athletic and learns to fence, and aspires to be as much like her mysterious prince as she can. The attraction of this show is all the conventions of fairy tales and romance that this series turns on their heads. When she arrives at the school she discovers that there is a secret society within the student council where the members also wear the same rose signet ring and duel each other for the possession of the"Rose Bride", another student here named Anthy Himemiya. Utena is drawn into these duels because she disapproves of anyone "owning" Anthy, so she finally gets to play the role of the prince rescuing the fair damsel in distress. What I’m going to show you here is a clip from one of the episodes where Utena has a duel with Tougo, the head of the student council, and loses to him because he tricks her into thinking he might be her mysterious prince and she loses her self-confidence. You’ll notice that the dueling arena hangs in the sky at the top of a spiral staircase with an unexplained castle floating upside down above it. Oh, and all of this is in the mysterious forest behind the school and no one can see it from the outside. Don’t spend any effort wondering about how this can be. Remember, this is a fairy tale, they don’t have to explain it.

Bugs Bunny this isn’t. And that’s the point I wanted to make here, how different anime stylizations are from what you’re used to seeing in US cartoons. You noticed how they framed the images, how they would overlay symbolic rose petals flying through the air during the duel, how they use unusual camera angles to accentuate the action, like showing only the shadows of the characters as they fight, how they would show a close up of the student council president’s face and hear his thoughts as the background while you see small images of the two duelist fighting in the foreground. You also notice that the student council president, Touga, is a classic example of the bishonen or "beautiful boy" I talked about earlier. Those flowing red locks of his are longer than either Utena’s or Anthy’s hair here. You’ll also notice that just as the action gets dramatic, they will show the character frozen in a dramatic pose for several seconds rather than showing them in motion. This is for two reasons. First, it’s economical for the animation studio since they need only draw a single image for the action rather than the hundreds it might take to animate several seconds of film. Second, the convention of an actor freezing right at the moment of dramatic action is something which comes from traditional Japanese theater, so this is what the Japanese audience expects. It draws out the actionand makes it more exciting. (We’ve also been doing something similar for years in the US (at least since the 70s TV show Six Million Dollar Man) where they do the action sequences in slow motion to achieve the same dramatic effect.) Another motif you saw here that is very common in anime is the hair blowing in the wind to signify significant emotions or the feeling of a scene. This is so common that in one of the Yamato (Starblazers in the US) movies, two of the characters are sitting out on the hull of the starship in the middle of deep space. Neither one is wearing a spacesuit and both of them have the wind (vacuum?) blowing through their hair.

So the overall impression you get from watching this sequence is how artificial, how theatrical, how unreal and surreal it is. While we’re used to quite a bit of surreality in our cartoons here, that is usually only in the comic ones (say Road Runner for example). In our more serious and dramatic animations (say Disney’s Beauty and theBeast) even though the subject matter may be fantastic (a prince transformed into a beast and dancing candleholders) the staging and style tries to look realistic. In US animation (and most western art for that matter) the artist is trying for realism. Even if the subject matteris fantastic, they try to make it look authentic and real to draw you into the story and make you forget that it’s a story. But as Antonia Levi points out in her book about anime, Samurai From Outer Space, realism is not something that is valued as highly in Asian art as it is in western art. In Asian art the aesthetic is to keep the viewer at arm’s length, to continually remind the reader or viewer that this is artificial, just a story. (Remember, "this is not a pipe".) So in Utena you are continually reminded that this is not real, that this is a fantastic allegory with the symbolism all in the foregroundinstead of the background. Now most anime do not have as blatant a theatrically about them as Utena does. When you see Nausicaa next week it will be closer in style to Beauty and the Beast than Utena, but you will still see some of these stylistic motifs appearing there.

And all this talk about the styles in anime and manga leads to the one question that everyone asks or comments on when they first see Japanese animation: "why don’t the characters look Japanese?" Now I find this is a very interesting question, not just for what it asks, but what it doesn’t ask. Stop and think for a minute. How many of you have ever asked or heard someone ask the question "why doesn’t Bart Simpson look anglo?"

Look at Bart. How many anglo people do you know who are yellow have square heads and eyes that bug out like that? If you do, they should probably get to a doctor immediately, they’ve probably got something very fatal!

Well, of course he doesn’t look like a typical anglo, he isn’t supposed to. He looks like a cartoon character. This is best explained in Scott McCloud’s wonderful book Understanding Comics. McCloud wanted to do a serious book explaining complex and subtle background to the art theory and graphical element in comics. But he decided that the only way to really explain comics was to do this in cartoon form. And as you can see in McCloud’s drawing here

that a face in comics is not a real face but a graphical abstraction of the real human face, and this abstraction can run the spectrum fromthe very sophisticated image of a face on the left to the very simple form of a circle with two dots and a dash on the right. But even the mostrealistic looking face in comics is still not a real face, but a simplified version of the human face and we as the viewers have to do some work in our own minds to interpret this collection of lines as a face. And we’re very forgiving about what we will interpret as a face. In fact McCloud has come up with a schematic for classifying cartoon faces which he calls the Picture Plane

The bottom left corner is labelled Reality and here is where he places all the cartoons where the style is realistic and naturalistic. As the cartoons move over to the lower right they become more simplified, more abstract to the point that you enter the realm of purely written text, so McCloud labels that corner as Meaning. Then as the cartoons move up to the peak, they become pure geometric shapes. So McCloud can sort all the different styles of drawings in comics, manga and cartoons by where they would fall within this pyramid. You'll notice that he includes two of the manga characters we've already seen here: Astroboy (number 112) and Oscar from Rose of Versailles (number 71). (By the way, if you want to explore more about Scott and his ideas about comics, he has a great website about this.)

So here in the US we have had several generations grow up looking at cartoon characters that run the gamut

from the simple to the complex. Look closely at these faces, who do you know that really has a nose as pointed as Mike Doonesbury or ajaw as square as Dick Tracy? And no matter how simple or complex, how realistic or caricatured the faces are, we interpret all of them as looking"just like us" in other words, anglos. [Even if you’re not anglo, if you grew up in the US, you still interpret them as part of the dominant culture, in other words, anglo.] In fact in American comics and cartoons, the artist must go to extreme lengths in the caricatures to denote that a character is anything other than anglo. We just assume that anglo is the "default setting" for anycartoon characters we see. Let me give you an example of this. As I was putting this lecture together I started thinking about the current animated series Arthur on PBS. Arthur is an anthropomorphic aardvark in a middle class neighborhood and all his friends are other anthropomorphic animals (rats, rabbits, chimps, dogs, etc.). One of the main underlying themes of the show is diversity, and the fact that all these different species can live together and get along. But as I started thinking about it, I realized that I still thought of all these characters as anglo animals. I started watching the show and tried to image any of the characters as black, or asian, or hispanic, and I just couldn’t . Underneath all that fur, they’re still just a bunch of white middle class suburban kids.

Now we swing around to the other side of the planet, to a place called Japan where several generations have grown up looking at cartoon figures who look like this:

Now while these faces look different in style from what we’re used to seeing, they’re still recognizably human faces. We still see that they run the gamut from the realistic looking to the ones with a very cartoony styling or even to the grotesque. So a Japanese growing up looks at all these characters and interprets them as looking "just like us", in other words, asian.

So the problem comes along when you have a character who looks like this:

This is the character Satsuki from Miyazaki’s film My Neighbor Totoro. If you show this image to a native Japanese, they immediately assume she is asian. She looks just like all the cartoon characters they have grown up watching, so it’s obvious she must be asian. But if you show this picture to someone who grew up in the US, they’ll see that while the styling is slightly unusual, it’s not that far in styling from all the cartoons and comic characters they’ve grown up with, so obviously she must be anglo. To the US viewer, "she just doesn’t look Japanese".

One picture, two viewers, each one bringing with them to the image their own cultural backgrounds and baggage and each one coming away with two completely different conclusion.

Now you begin to see what I was talking about at the beginning of this lecture about how you have to be careful in reading graphical text? Contrary to popular belief, graphical images are not obvious to us. Not only can you misread graphical text just as you can misread written text, it’s easier to do that because people assume that the interpretation they are making is obvious, and therefore must be absolutely true.

So the answer to the question of "why don’t they look Japanese?" is another question: "Why should they?" They’re not supposed to look Japanese, they’re supposed to look like cartoon characters.